[Sigia-l] card sorting to group links, but priority?

[Eric Scheid]

Jared Spool mentions [1] in an article that Card Sorting [2] is an effective
tool for forming groups of *links* on pages in order to emphasise
information scent. These link groups might not correlate with the actual
organisation of the information being linked to, and I imagine the links
could quite possibly be grouped differently on some other portal page
intended for some other audience.

>    + Users deduce part of a link's scent from it's proximity to
>      related links. Groups of links can increase the scent of each
>      individual link contained in the group.

[...]

> Card sorting is an effective technique for understanding how to group
> the links. 

He then goes on to say this:

> Link order is also very important. Well-designed portals put the most
> important links at the very top and order the remaining links by priority and
> need. [P]oorly-designed portals often resort to alphabetical order,

My question then is: what techniques can we use to discover (and test?) the
optimum order of these links within their groups?

e.

[1] http://www.uie.com/events/roadshow/articles/intranet_portals_scent/
[2] http://IAwiki.net/CardSorting